


22 Cats

by executrix



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: AU, Multi, Pre-TWB
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-28
Updated: 2014-11-28
Packaged: 2018-02-27 06:43:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2683070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Backstory: The Federation motivates its employees by wholesome competition.</p>
            </blockquote>





	22 Cats

**Author's Note:**

> For elviaprose, who wanted me to finish it.

**Getting to know you,  
Getting to know all about you**

A  
“Computers,” Carnell said with a sigh. “I splashed out and bought a little computer that plays chess with me, but otherwise, they’re a mystery. So, explain it to me in simpler terms.”

“It’s the central server for the banking system,” Captain Chesku said. “Every night, a few centimes are being taken away from each of the large corporate and institutional accounts. A classic salami tactic fraud. But…they’re being put back at the end of the night.” 

“Someone trying it on, then? Getting ready for the real coup in the future?”

“It could be. Or, then again, it could just be a clever person with time on his hands.”

“Criminal?” Carnell asked. “Or political?” 

Sula shrugged. “I haven’t enough information at this stage even to surmise. Give me the assignment, and I’ll find out for you.” 

Carnell steepled his fingers to ponder. If Chesku were a mere lieutenant, he’d agree in a heartbeat—that way, he’d get credit for any success but she’d be far enough down the ladder to suffer all the consequences of failure. But as it was, the gap between a Captain and a Lieutenant-Colonel was just wide enough to create problems. 

B  
“At ease, Space Lieutenant,” Carnell said. “Your assignment is to infiltrate the Freedom Party cell, by, ah, getting into the good graces of one of their senior members.” He spun the monitor part-way so Travis could see the screen. “He’s called Blake.”

“And how’m I supposed to do that?”

“Oh, sexually, of course. I believe it used to be called a “honeytrap.” 

“Even if it weren’t disgusting…” (Carnell smirked at him) “It’s against the law! I can’t do that!”

Carnell scrolled idly down the file, stroking the screen sensually with a fingertip that, Travis noted with disapproval, was manicured with clear polish. 

“You do have a choice,” Carnell said. “Either you can carry out this assignment which, as you pointed out, does involve a degree of…extra-legal activity.” He paused, for Travis to hear him not-saying, “which seems to be your speciality.” “Or, on the other hand, you can disobey a direct order.”

“That’s not bloody fair!”

“Of course not,” Carnell said. If he was stuck in Counter-Terrorism (a hiding to nowhere; you could never suppress every revolutionary cell when all it took to start up a new one was two nutters with a grievance and a roneograph) at least he could have some fun. He had seriously considered exchanging the files, but he didn’t think the girl would have much of a chance with Blake. “An impossible situation, isn’t it? So you’ve got 22 cats. The only way forward is to succeed in the assignment.” 

**Getting to like you.  
Getting to hope you like me.**

A  
Anna put two EthaNo! tablets on her tongue and swallowed them with the dregs of a long-gone-cold cup of tea. Going on the razzle on the state payroll was an important part of her job. The citizens of the Federation tended to spend as much time off their face as they could in any event, and when someone else was buying the drinks and the all-purpose absolution of drunkenness was available, they could speak freely.

She leaned back in her chair, spun it, and stared at the wall. She tried to imagine what it would be like—knowing that, when you were 25, you had reached the absolute summit of your career, and you’d be there for another 40 years at least but you had nothing more to hope for. She knew that football stars peaked and then declined, and so did gymnasts and ballet dancers and mannequins, but at least they could blame physical decline, not the people who signed their paychecks.

Anna waved at the woman she was there to meet—she looked a little better than the photograph in her file, but not a lot better. Anna would have assumed that the drab light brown was her natural hair color, but almost an inch of roots could be seen. An inch was a lot in the boring but no doubt practical short hairstyle. 

Anna remembered to ask what Charysse was drinking. “I’m Sula Chesku,” she said. “From…you know,” with a vague gesture encompassing “The walls have ears” and “Aren’t we clever, we know something not everybody knows” and “Isn’t it exciting, most interesting thing in your drab little life.” And, because it was a vague and left-handed gesture, it highlighted the big square cushion of her engagement ring.

“Well, I got an Upgrade by Marriage,” Anna said. “But…” and she gazed significantly at the modest, slightly tarnished ring on Charysse’s finger. 

Chief Warrant Officer Wurie spun the ring, then put her hand down on the table. “Oh, Pavlik is wonderful, I wouldn’t be without him, but he’s a Delta like me. He’s an electrician.” 

“Well, perhaps, as you’ve agreed to meet me, I can do something about an extra-grade appointment…” Anna said vaguely. Charysse nodded. Between that and the Tequila Planetfalls, she would have a perfect excuse for…whatever it was she said to Anna that she couldn’t remember.

“I wouldn’t want to get him into any trouble…he was nice to me when no one else was…I was his first girl, you see,” Charysse said. 

“Just some routine inquiries, nothing to worry about.” No one in the Federation who had enough sense to buckle his or her boots would actually believe that Central Security ever sent around an agent for routine inquiries, but by the same minimal standard they wouldn’t demur either.

“And the maths master, oh, can’t remember his name, was his first man,” Charysse confided. 

Anna remembered to look surprised. “Weren’t you jealous?”

“Well, I’d got as much on as I could handle!” she said. “And they say you don’t miss a shive off a cut loaf. Blokes are always cut loaves, aren’t they? And they can’t get up the gum tree.” Charysse leaned forward. “Don’t know what Kerr’s like now…hope he hasn’t lost his hair, he was always so proud of it. He kept it smelling really nice, a lot of his pocket money went on things like that. He found a way to buy things from Alpha shops, I suppose they sold things out the back door.”

“Still got most of it,” Anna said, but touching the crown of her head and shaking her head a little.

“Y’see, he really likes girls’ bodies. A lot of blokes don’t, they just want to shove it in, shoot off, see if they haven’t missed the last quarter of the match on replay, y’know? Also, Kerr told me that he’d got it figured out. Placed as he was, he was never going to get a very fancy job, so he wasn’t going to get power that way. And he wasn’t a big bloke…”

Anna nodded; Avon had not turned into Falstaff in the intervening decades, but was no longer a stripling either. Of course photographs add four kilos or so…

“So he couldn’t sort anyone out physically. We hadn’t a bean, of course, a Delta and a Beta, so he couldn’t get any power over anyone that way. He said that he’d worked it out that you could get to people sexually, find out what they liked and see that they got plenty! He was patient, wouldn’t mind hanging about with his head between your legs ‘till next Tuesday if that’s what it took. And, anyway, he said it was free entertainment.”

Anna raised her hand for the waiter to bring another round. 

“In Year Eleven,” Charysse said, “We had technical drawing. He made a proper blueprint of me, section and elevation, and stars on all my favorite bits. Didn’t half give him an elevation.”

B  
Blake often thought, as he got off the tram in the morning, that the Aquitar Project headquarters really should have been in a better neighborhood. Doubtless it had been built on a parcel of land belonging to some apparatchik’s brother-in-law. 

A man with brilliant dark eyes, and dark hair falling on his forehead from a side parting, passed Blake on the people-mover headed in the opposite direction. The belts moved slowly, so the man held Blake’s eyes, for perhaps two or three seconds. And smiled at him. 

Blake blinked, hoping no one had noticed. It wasn’t actually illegal, but it was certainly unusual. The stranger‘s blue coveralls set off his broad shoulders and trim waist, and he had a surprisingly patrician face. Blake took the chance of smiling back, then returned his features to the conventional blank scowl. 

Two days later, Blake decided that he hadn’t the time for lunch in the Executive Dining Room, what with the waiters dawdling between courses so that the food was usually tepid anyway, and the difficulty of getting any work done in the afternoon after a heavy meal. With the intention of getting a cheese sandwich and a Vitazade to take away, he took the escalator down two flights to the Labor Grades cafeteria. This, too, was unusual but not criminalized behavior. 

A shipment of tropical fruit had just come from Palmeiro, so Blake added a cup of mango and papaya cubes to his tray. 

To his elaborately enacted surprise, the man who had smiled at Blake sat at one of the tables at the periphery of the room. He was by himself, reading what looked to Blake like a tabloid newspaper on his rederiter. Blake said, “Mind if I sit down?”

“It’s a free Dome,” the man said, not looking up from the rederiter. Blake had to remind himself to choke back what he wanted to say. “What’re you doing here, posh bloke like you?”

“We have a major deliverable coming up, so I thought I’d take a quick break, clear out my thoughts, you know?”

“I wouldn’t know, really. They don’t pay me to think.” Blake blinked, hoping that no one, breathing or electronic, had overheard. 

“Well, I just wanted a quick sandwich…Jaskcub,” Blake said, reading the ID pass clipped to the man’s coverall. “My name’s Blake, by the way. Roj Blake. Doing anything now that it’s Friday?” Blake asked, pantomiming idle curiosity.

Jaskcub shrugged. “Might go for a pint.”

“What pub d’you use?”

“The local,” Jaskcub said, leaning back in his chair to observe Blake’s reaction. “Don’t much fancy it on Tuesdays, though.”

Blake, startled, laughed and then cut off the laugh. “Neither do I,” he said, although he knew he’d best change the subject. “Jaskcub, that’s a Belhangrian name, isn’t it?”

Jaskcub nodded. “First name’s Mivvalon, that sticks out a mile in terms of showing where I’m from. Just as glad everyone goes by surnames here.” Travis’ legend had been chosen so that, if he wasn’t aware of anything that had happened in the Domes when he was junketing around the galaxy gaining a reputation, it could be attributed to his immigrant status.

**Putting it my way, but nicely  
You are precisely  
My cup of tea **

A  
Anna perched on the stepladder in the bookshop, chatting with the owner. She had been there often enough to be offered dreadful herbal concoctions that had been stewing all day on the hotplate; indeed, often enough to feel secure in not drinking them. 

She wondered about whether she should just abandon a tactic that had obviously failed, and either try to find some other way to meet Avon or simply scrub the mission, when he walked through the door. Anna blinked, to ascertain that he really was there, and not a hallucination conjured up by her desire to resolve the assignment one way or the other. 

“Hullo, Dorothea,” Avon said. “Sorry I haven’t been in for a while, there was a big push on at work, then I had some unexpected expenses. But you’ve still got that book I wanted, haven’t you?”

“Well, no,” the owner said. “Just sold it…to her. You didn’t leave a deposit, you know.” 

“Oh, I’m sorry!” Anna said, looking up under her eyelashes. 

“Anna Grant,” Dorothea said. “Meet Kerr Avon.” 

Avon thought she was remarkably pretty, and looked intelligent as well. “There’s a café just down the street,” he said. “Perhaps you can show me your new acquisition? Pre-Atomic computing is an interest of mine. They failed in some quite significant ways, obviously, but not all of their technology was on a par with their diplomacy.”

“I daresay we’d be laughed at if we said so,” Anna said, P-K4 of establishing common ground, “But C++ actually had some interesting ideas.” 

The coffee wasn’t very good and it was expensive, so Avon suggested that they go to his flat, he had some fresh coffee from a shipment from Palmeiro, and a French press to brew it. Anna said “all right” so he could breathe again. 

“My flat isn’t…” he said, and then, sounding almost angry, “I’m not rich. I wish I was. But perhaps I am interesting. Perhaps I can interest you.” 

“Perhaps,” Anna said.

Anna didn’t really like black coffee, although of course she said she did because there wasn’t any milk. It was very good coffee, though. Later on, after her nicely-timed confession, he started keeping half-pints of milk in the cooler. 

There wasn’t a sofa, and there was only one stool under the shelf on a piano hinge perpendicular to the cooking unit. What fun would it have been to start out on the bed at the outset? The armchair was just about big enough for two people (first Anna perched on the rolled arm, then let herself fall sideways somewhat into Avon’s lap),

And they read no more that day. 

 

B  
“It’s a terrible idea!” Blake said.

“Calm down, Roj,” Bran Foster said. 

“I can’t calm down, there’s too much at stake.”

“I don’t like this British Brotherhood…”

“Brutish Brotherhood!”

“…Any more than you do, but how can we have even the option of an armed uprising without arms, and without training? I want soldiers, Roj, not martyrs.” 

“And if we decide to abandon peaceful protest—but only if and when we’re strong enough to opt for a military solution—then I want to associate with soldiers, not hoodlums. A local gang of hoodlums that can’t even succeed in its ambition to emulate the Terra Nostra? Foster, we can’t do this, it’ll finish us.”

“D’you know what will finish us? Insisting on ideological purity, like a hysterical spinster with nothing on her mind but clamping her knees together.”

“Situated as we are, we have to box clever. We have no room for mistakes.”

“Remember, Roj, not everyone had our advantages which, in this case, include cadet training. Handling a weapon, elementary tactics, that’s all in a day’s work to you, but not to our Gamma and Delta recruits.”

“If they’ve been in a Saturday-night punch-up down the local, that gives them more real military experience than firing an ancient rifle at a paper target, or pirouetting around a parade ground pretending to drill,” Blake said. “In terms of real advantages from my education, that’s pretty far down the list.”

**Getting to feel free and easy,  
When I am with you,  
Getting to know what to say.**

A  
Anna climbed the stairs to Avon’s flat. She knocked on the door. Nothing happened. The corridor was dimly lit, so it took her a moment to see the note (the yellow paper fading into the beige paint) stuck to the door. “It’s not convenient,” the note said. “Try again next week.” 

Anna crumpled the note into her handbag and stalked out. She went right back to her office. She logged on, and found the regular report of credit transactions from a discreet and very select establishment. She would recognize Avon’s account number anywhere. “Why, you randy little sod,” she said. “Literally!” 

She was glad of the chance to get home early, remembered that actually she didn’t want to get home early at all, and ended up going to an Inner Party shop and buying a twelve-hundred-credit handbag she didn’t even want.

B  
One consequence of the Aquitar Project’s location was that it straddled a Beta and a Gamma precinct, which was unusually convenient for Gamma workers who could get home before curfew even if their supervisor suggested that they stay on after clocking-out time. It was also, like all mixed areas, déclassé and somewhat raffish. 

The Three Bells—known to its habitués as The Bell End—gained some protection by its location. More so, of course, by the envelope delivered to the Vice Squad every Tuesday. Nonetheless, the publican deemed it prudent to make Tuesday Ladies’ Night, with half-price drinks that allowed even a cash-strapped butch to treat her femme to a Babycham and still order a boilermaker for herself. 

There was a red light located near the Gents’ that flashed when the bagman was within range of the outward-facing security camera (the inward-facing one was subject to periodic malfunctions, particularly when the police seized the tapes). Everyone in the bar at the time would give a sigh, and everyone who was dancing paired up with a partner of the opposite sex (if one could be found; otherwise, they sat down). The jukebox would shift to a sedate Jolynien Shuffle or Pepperpot Hop.

“Hullo, Miv,” Blake said. “Thought you might be here. What’re you drinking?”

“Black-and-tan,” Jaskcub said. Blake fetched it, a pint of IPA for himself, and several bags of crisps. “Don’t know what sort you like,” he said.

“Want to find out, do you?”

“Oh, yes,” Blake said, in a comforting growl that might have reminded Jaskcub of Narnia books. If they had been available for him to read as a child. If he had read anything at all. 

**Haven’t you noticed?  
Suddenly I’m bright and breezy **

A  
Anna thought Avon looked particularly ridiculous, his feet white beneath the dark trousers he was doing up. 

“I didn’t appreciate your being on the Missing list the last time I came here,” Anna said. Her gold compact gave a decisive snap. Actually it had worked out well, saved her the trouble of fabricating a quarrel to bring them closer together.

“Still, I suppose it would have been worse if you’d tried to Comm me, either at work or at home. It wouldn’t do for my husband to answer, would it?”

Avon turned to face her, a flushed oval hectic on each cheekbone. “Ah. That is a factor I hadn’t considered. You might have told me, Anna.”

Sula shrugged. “I thought you knew.”

“How? You never said. You don’t wear a ring.”

{{Of course not}} she thought, glad that she hadn’t blurted out “You’d know if you bothered to read the file.” {{If you can’t remember simple things like when to take off your rings, you wouldn’t last a month in weekly rep, much less Central Security.}}

“And you didn’t act as if you were married. Or at least not contentedly so.”

{{This case is certainly increasing my husband’s contentment}} Sula thought. {{Odd how he never wanted an action replay of any other forensic accounting assignments.}} 

“My salary’s barely enough to live on,” she said. (She was, for the record, a sub-sub-minister at the Department of Alien Wet Fish Importation.) “Of course I’d rather be with you. But I’d also rather have decent clothes on my back and a decent roof over my head, not…” (just one sweep of a dismissive hand.) 

She waited for Avon to say something. She suspected that he’d already sneaked off to a priest to confess fornication (and he wouldn’t be able to keep even his rotten little technician’s job if she disclosed *that* little tidbit). She held her breath, wondering whether she would have to abort the mission. {{I am steeped in blood so far}} she thought, {{That to retreat were as tedious as going o’er.}}

Avon fastened his belt as if it were a garrotte, and walked over to Anna. He put his arms around her and put his head down on her shoulder. “Anna.” he said. “I don’t want to lose you. But you ought to have told me.”

“Why? Does it change the way you feel about me? I’m still the same person.”  
“What does it matter what I feel? What matters is what one does. And I think there’s something I can do.”

B  
Blake reflected that, if you built a society where everyone hated everyone, but men often hated women more than they hated other men, then it was surprisingly possible to get away with spending time with a male lover. The real problem was differences in grade. If Jaskcub wore the best clothes in his working wardrobe, and Blake his most casual and worn-out, then there were places they could plausibly both be without making it irrebuttable that they had arrived together. 

The Bell-End (but they couldn’t risk going there too often). There were never any tickets available to watch the matches live, so a sports pub with an extra-large viewerscreen was unsuspicious. The municipal swimming baths (although, to Blake’s disappointment, swimming costumes had been required during men’s hours for decades).A vizzie palais (although Blake always found Jaskcub’s favorite programmes boring). 

“What if someone sees you?” Miv said. “They’ll wonder why you’re up in the three-credit balcony, not the twelve-credit stalls.” Even though he didn’t get to keep the money, so perhaps could be acquitted of gold-digging, Travis felt reassured when Blake spent money on him.

“Well, I suppose I could run to a pair for the stalls,” Blake said reluctantly. His salary was not opulent, even if he hadn’t been living two double lives. “Or…I know, if anyone asks, or even if they don’t I’ll volunteer, that I’m saving up to buy this flat when the block goes private.” 

“Don’t volunteer information,” Miv said. “Easiest way to ruin an undercover op.”

“Know a lot about it, do you?” Blake said, hunching his shoulders, disliking the turn the conversation was taking.

“Just what I’ve seen in the old viz, of course.”

**Because of all the beautiful and new  
Things I’m learning about you **

A  
“Well!” Carnell said. “Your reports make it all look very satisfactory. Timely and detailed.” Sula didn’t fail to notice, but didn’t reply to, the implication that she simply filled up the reports while sitting at home watching the afternoon housewives’ programming. 

She shrugged. “Just like you said, during those lectures at the Training Institute. Con artists, clerics, carnival mentalists, Freudian analysts. Find out what the mark wants to hear, and parrot it back.”

B  
Nervously alternating between sips of vodka and mouthwash, Blake waited for what he knew would be their last time together. He had dreaded the conversation for weeks. 

“Don’t you care about me? Don’t you care at all?” Miv said. 

“Of course!” Blake shouted. “You know that’s why we have to do this. Because I care. Because you’re a good bloke and I think—I hope—I made you happy. Because I can’t stand the thought of anything happening to you because of me. If I lost my job, I daresay I could pay to have the records erased, and someone would pull some strings to get me another job, but where would you be? And that might not be the worst thing that happened. We’ve got to quit when we’re ahead. ”

“Bloody Alphas! What d’you think, that because I’m Labor Grade you can throw me away like a used paper handkerchief?”

“You mustn’t talk like that where anyone can hear—and if you talk like that when no one can hear you’ll get careless—the last thing we need is to be reported as politically unreliable.”

“You just want me to go quietly, don’t you? Not make a scene?”

“It’s for the best,” Blake said.

“Fucking Alphas!” Miv said, and stormed out. He slammed the door hard enough to rattle the corridor’s gallery of bad prints, in cheap frames, of badly-painted bouquets of flowers extinct for hundreds of years.

“You haven’t an appointment, you know,” Carnell said the next morning, idly wondering if Travis had killed, brutalized, or merely intimidated the assistant whose desk was in the hall outside Carnell’s office. 

“Sod your appointment and sod you. I need a team to surveil Blake’s flat.”

“Why can’t you do it yourself? Or rather, why is surveillance required when you’re haunting the place going ‘Hamlet, revenge’?”

Silence fell.

“Given you the push, has he? You failed, then,” Carnell said. “You failed again.”

“What are you, Sunny Jim, suicidal?”

“Are you?” Carnell said. 

**Day by day!**

A  
“So that’s it,” Sula said. “It’s not political, it’s personal. He’s fed up with his life, wants to run off with me and live a life of luxury someplace else. He can’t stop patting himself on the back, how clever he was to have his little hobbyist fraud scheme all ready when he actually wanted to use it.” 

“Not really a Counter-Terrorism matter then, is it?” Carnell said. “So I’ll just port it over to Banking and Securities. Not much glory for either of us, and when the quarterly budget comes up for review, we’ll have a hard time justifying the expenditure.”

“See that he isn’t shot while escaping,” Anna said. Bank fraud wasn’t a capital offense, after all. She would never see him again, nor would anyone else on Earth. She didn’t think she would mind. In fact, if she never saw another man again, it would be too soon. If only the current regime did not take such a dim view of Religionists, a nice comfortable convent would be perfect. But then, she realized, there would always be priests popping in and expecting to see you on your knees, so no net gain there.

“I hardly think you’re in any position to make demands. You really wouldn’t be, even if you’d managed this better. Now, Space Lieutenant Travis has done well—pipped you at the post—uncovered” (Carnell smirked) “a whole terrorist cell with major ramifications. He’ll get a big promotion. Once he’s out of hospital.”

B  
Blake deliberately turned his back on the British Brotherhood cadre. “If you’re going to infest my local, I’ll have to go drink someplace else,” he said. 

“That’s no way to talk,” Rafe Thompkins said. “In fact, you owe us a round.”

“What the hell for?” Blake said, calculating his chances against four thugs in an immediate brawl and the longer-range threat of their betraying the Freedom Party cell. That would require confessing their own subversive activities, but they would probably do that anyway, the next time they were arrested for something and offered up the information to reduce their sentences.

“Did you a favor,” Thompkins said. “You know, that perv who was always hanging about outside your flat?”

Blake felt like he could use a large measure of spirits just around then. “What—there’s nobody hanging about outside my flat, of course I’d have noticed.”

“You must be blind,” Rafe’s brother-in-law Droo said. “Anyway, we sorted him for you, ‘course you wouldn’t want filth like that stalking you.”

“Sorted?” Blake said, wondering what tone of voice would be appropriate and hoping he managed it.

“Gave him a good kicking,” Droo’s best mate Eddie boomed. 

“First of all, I can take care of myself, and second of all, placed as we are, we daren’t attract any police attention,” Blake said. He felt lightheaded, Olympian, his head stretched far away from the feet planted in this—godawful mess. For once he wasn’t worried about being overheard, anyone would just assume a business dispute over nicked mopeds or white goods falling off lorries. 

Blake never got to find out what would have happened if the discussion had continued. First all the lights in the Phibian and Compasses went out, then four troopers swaggered in and said that the place was shut down and everyone had to get off the streets, curfew was shifted back to 19:00 hours. It remained there for three weeks. They didn’t give an explanation, but, then, they didn’t have to. 

There was a push on at work, so he often got home after curfew, but there was a special tram laid on, with military guards, for Aquitar Project workers. He couldn’t imagine any way he could have gone to the hospital to visit Miv anyway, but, to his guilty relief, this made it impossible in an entirely different way. Miv never came back to work. Blake often considered finding a way to trace what had happened to him, but he couldn’t justify the risk. As Bran Foster never ceased to remind the inner members of their cell, they couldn’t afford any irregularity in their private lives. Anything that could draw attention. An arrest, a security check, even an application for a bank loan could put a dissident in a position of, willingly or unwillingly, betraying the whole operation and all the comrades. So, for the quite short time between the attack while Blake still had possession of his memories, he often reproached himself for not doing more, but he knew that the secrets weren’t just his to keep.

When Blake could finally meet with Bran Foster again, Foster’s best intel was that the curfew had been imposed because there had been a terrorist attack that grievously wounded a Space Command officer. They couldn’t figure out who the hell it could have been—the Freedom Party certainly hadn’t done it, and it was a long way for Avalon’s people to come for a fairly pointless attack on some random officer, without so much as paying a courtesy call on the local subversive element. Blake and Foster independently came to the conclusion that it was another internal putsch within Space Command, with Muggins carrying the can as usual.

And every time they met after that, Travis searched Blake’s face for even the faintest gleam of recognition. Not that he was Travis, of course—Blake managed that well enough--but what had passed between them. Yet, despite the generally poor quality of Federation technology, particularly psychotechnology (just consider the multiple failures located inside Vila’s head!) Blake never remembered a moment of their relationship. Unless something that stayed in his head stayed his hand whenever he had a chance to kill Travis. Unless he somehow refused to gratify Travis’ desire for something between a Liebestod and suicide-by-Blake.

Avon, of course, remembered enough of what he had been told about Anna, for the both of them. For an army of them.

**Author's Note:**

> Lyrics, from "The King and I," by Oscar Hammerstein, not by me.
> 
> A theme of Blakes7 that fascinates me is the decay of language, and "22 Cats" (in a society which may or may not have actual cats, although "Weapon" tells us that there are actual rats) is their version of Catch-22, a concept which the Federation's devoted citizens are certainly familiar with.


End file.
